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    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Pachinko: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #36
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Pachinko: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #36
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Pachinko: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #36
    Ebook119 pages1 hour

    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Pachinko: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #36

    By Kathryn Cope

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    About this ebook

    An essential tool for all reading groups – a detailed guide to Min Jin Lee's bestselling novel, Pachinko!

    A comprehensive guide to Min Jin Lee's remarkable novel Pachinko, this discussion aid includes a wealth of information and resources: twenty-one thought-provoking discussion questions; useful literary and historical context; an author biography; a plot summary; analyses of themes & imagery; character analysis; recommended further reading and even a quick quiz.

    This companion guide takes the hard work out of preparing for meetings and guarantees productive discussion. For solo readers, it encourages a deeper examination of this rich and rewarding text.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKathryn Cope
    Release dateDec 23, 2018
    ISBN9781386269762
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: Pachinko: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #36
    Author

    Kathryn Cope

    Kathryn Cope graduated in English Literature from Manchester University and obtained her master’s degree in contemporary fiction from the University of York. She is the author of Study Guides for Book Clubs and the HarperCollins Offical Book Club Guide series. She lives in the Staffordshire Moorlands with her husband, son and dog.

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      Book preview

      Study Guide for Book Clubs - Kathryn Cope

      Introduction

      There are few things more rewarding than getting together with a group of like-minded people and discussing a good book. Book club meetings, at their best, are vibrant, passionate affairs. Each member will bring along a different perspective and ideally there will be heated debate.

      A surprising number of book club members, however, report that their meetings have been a disappointment. Even though their group loved the particular book they were discussing, they could think of astonishingly little to say about it. Failing to find interesting discussion angles for a book is the single most common reason for book group discussions to fall flat. Most book groups only meet once a month and a lackluster meeting is frustrating for everyone.

      Study Guides for Book Clubs were born out of a passion for reading groups. Packed with information, they take the hard work out of preparing for a meeting and ensure that your book group discussions never run dry. How you choose to use the guides is entirely up to you. The author biography, historical, and style sections provide useful background information which may be interesting to share with your group at the beginning of your meeting. The all-important list of discussion questions, which will probably form the core of your meeting, can be found towards the end of this guide. To support your responses to the discussion questions, you may find it helpful to refer to the ‘Themes’ and ‘Character’ sections.

      A detailed plot synopsis is provided as an aide-memoire if you need to recap on the finer points of the plot. There is also a quick quiz - a fun way to test your knowledge and bring your discussion to a close. Finally, if this was a book that you particularly enjoyed, the guide concludes with a list of books similar in style or subject matter.

      This guide contains spoilers. Please do not be tempted to read it before you have read the original novel as plot surprises will be well and truly ruined.

      Kathryn Cope, 2018

      Min Jin Lee

      Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea. In 1976, when she was seven, her parents emigrated to Queens, New York. The move represented a significant change in lifestyle for her father and mother, who had respectively worked in marketing and as a music teacher in Korea. Initially opening a news kiosk, they progressed to running a small wholesale jewellery shop and were eventually successful enough to send their three daughters to college.

      Lee graduated from Yale in 1990 with a degree in history. She went to law school and practiced law for two years before giving up to become a full-time writer. Her debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires was published in 2007. A coming-of-age tale, it tells the story of Casey Han, the daughter of Korean immigrants who grows up in Queens but is increasingly attracted by a glitzy Manhattan lifestyle. Critically acclaimed, the novel was a National Book Award finalist.

      Although Pachinko was Lee’s second published novel, she began it before Free Food for Millionaires in the 1990s. Her decision to write about the experience of Koreans in Japan was inspired by a talk she attended in the 1990s. Having grown up in the USA where Koreans were generally perceived as aspirational and hardworking, she was shocked to learn that, in Japan, they were treated as second-class citizens. Lee’s early attempts at the novel (then entitled Motherland) proved frustratingly unsuccessful. Beginning her story in the 1970s, she focused the narrative on Solomon Baek (a character who would eventually appear in the final third of Pachinko). Somehow, however, the story did not feel authentic. It was only when Lee’s husband (a Japanese banker) took a job in Tokyo that the book began to come together. Living in Japan from 2007–2011, Min Jin Lee had the opportunity to interview the Koreans who lived there. As a result, she realised that she would have to delve further back in history (1910, to be exact) to do their story justice. Pachinko was finally published in 2017. A National Book Award finalist, it became a New York Times Bestseller and appeared on over 70 best book of the year lists.

      In addition to her novels, Min Jin Lee has written short fiction, literary criticism and pieces on politics, culture, travel and food. These have been widely published in a range of international publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Times, The Guardian, and Conde Nast Traveler of London.

      The author currently lives in Boston and is working on American Hagwon which she has described as the third in her Korean trilogy.

      https://www.minjinlee.com/

      Historical Context

      For readers with little knowledge of twentieth century Korean history, Pachinko provides a wealth of information. Spanning the period from Korea’s colonisation by Japan through the Second World War and the Korean War, Lee reconstructs the recent history of the Korean people. The thorough nature of the author’s historical research is clear in her detailed descriptions of everything from living conditions in traditional Korean homes to the cramped layouts of the Japanese ghettoes and the interiors of pachinko parlours.

      It is a mark of Lee’s great skill as a writer that she applies her extensive research with a light touch. Cultural details are unobtrusively slipped in through the course of the story without ever slowing down the plot. By sharing the routines of her characters, readers learn, for example, that Japanese houses are divided into rooms by sliding paper doors and measured by mats. We also discover that it is routine for Japanese residents to visit public bathhouses to perform their daily ablutions. Immersing readers in the world of her characters, Lee offers no lengthy explanations and even includes Korean and Japanese words, trusting our ability to decipher them.

      Pachinko shows rather than tells the history of the Korean people by illustrating how historical and national events affect the characters on a personal level. The economic impact of Japan’s occupation of Korea is shown first through Hoonie’s parents, who rent their bedroom to lodgers to pay increasingly exorbitant taxes. Yangjin’s father is forced to marry her off when his farmland is taken over by the Japanese and he can no longer afford to feed his daughters. Meanwhile, the effects of the Japanese rice shortage in 1918 are illustrated when Yangjin struggles to buy white rice to celebrate Sunja’s wedding as all available supplies have been reserved for the Japanese.

      When Sunja and Isak move to Japan, the discrimination Koreans face there is illustrated in the miserable living conditions of Yoseb and Kyunghee. The religious persecution of Christians by the Japanese is also powerfully demonstrated when Isak and his associates are imprisoned indefinitely. As Japan enters into World War II, Lee shows the impact on the ordinary man as prices are raised, food becomes scarce and Yoseb cannot support his family even with two jobs. When the war comes to an end, we again see the individual cost of this as Yoseb, who is working in a military factory, is horrifically burned in the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki.

      During Sunja’s years in Japan, she hears stories (largely from Hansu) about the terrible state of her homeland. These stories take on a reality when Hansu retrieves Yangjin from Korea, aged and clearly malnourished. Forced to give up the boarding house due to further raises in taxes, we learn that she has been working as a servant and sleeping in a cupboard. Meanwhile, Bokhee and Dokhee, have suffered the fate of many Korean girls and been lured into sexual slavery.

      Pachinko illustrates that, even by the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese discrimination against Koreans had not come to an end. When Solomon goes through the humiliating process of applying for his alien registration card on his fourteenth birthday, Lee demonstrates that all Koreans born in Japan still had to apply for permission to stay there. By illustrating the ways in which her characters are affected by historical events, Lee ensures that these details stick in readers’ minds.

      While Pachinko conveys details of Korean history more powerfully than any factual account, the following provides a straightforward explanation of the novel’s historical background.

      The Japanese Occupation of Korea

      Sandwiched between the larger powers of China, Russia and Japan, the geographical location of the Korean Peninsula made it ripe for colonisation. Russia and Japan fought for control of the country and, in 1910, Japan was victorious. Korea was promptly annexed and Japan installed a puppet leader (Emperor Sunjong). By the time the emperor died in 1926, Japan had done away with any pretence of maintaining the Korean

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